Whiteboard Wednesday #6: How to optimise Google Shopping for Black Friday | Clearhaus Learning

Google Shopping is a great way to sell products on Black Friday - but there’s a heavy competition to appear on the top of the Google search results.

In this video, Dennis Cassøe form WakeupData will talk about how you can optimise your Google Shopping ad - both in general, but also in particular for Black Friday.

Watch it here!

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Hi. Welcome to Whiteboard Wednesday. My name is Dennis Cassøe and I’m the CEO and co-founder of WakeupData.

Today, I’d like to talk a bit about Black Friday and the following Cyber Monday. This year, Black Friday is on 23rd of November, and it’s one of those really key important days in e-commerce and e-commerce marketing.

I will not focus on Black Friday as a whole, but only on that small area that is related to the Google Shopping campaigns that most e-commerce stores run. Because there’s quite a few things you can do for this specific day, that is worth at least thinking about if you should do it, that might improve on your performance on Google Shopping.

First and foremost, if you don’t already have it, make sure you have the GTINs in the feed. GTINs are those global trade identifiers that every item have. You usually see it on the back of the barcode of the product, and it’s really important to add them to the Google Shopping feed if you can, because it will allow the ads to be displayed more correctly and also in the right comparison with all the competitors’ products.

If you don’t have it in your e-Commerce site, you might have it somewhere else and then by merging those two sources together you can add it there.

Next part is split testing. We all have the assumption of what works and what doesn’t work, and already now you should start testing out different variations of titles to see what performs best. Is it best to have brand or the product type, or the color or whatever combination makes the most sense for different types of products?

So by testing this out instead of just basing it on assumption and the so-called best practices, you’ll be able to actually base it on what people like and when you get to Black Friday, it might also be worth thinking about how those titles are being displayed in comparison to what other companies are doing.

Third part is keywords, specifically for this date lacing your descriptions with keywords related to Black Friday can increase your performance on Google Shopping. And also just thinking about how should your title look on this specific day? Because again, it might be a different way you should appeal to people on this day than others.

Fourth thing is mobile accessibility because even though we’re here talking about the feed, a part of the quality or the way that Google analyse if they should display your ads compared to others, is how well does your site perform on mobile?

And also because specifically on these days people research a lot during the day on their phone to figure out should I buy this item or shouldn’t I. They might buy it on desktop later but they’ll research it on their phone and it has impact also on the price you’re paying on the Google Shopping campaigns.

The last thing I’ll take out is frequency, because the frequency of how often you update your feed on Google Shopping is highly important, especially, again this day, because you might have campaigns the start at midnight and stop again the next midnight, and you only want to display them in that period. If you don’t update the feed regularly enough you might show the wrong prices either the day before or the day after.

Also, if you’re a site with a certain amount of sale that day, the quantity you have in stock might change a lot and you might have items that go out of stock during the day, and if you don’t update the feed regularly, you might end up paying for products that’s no longer in your inventory.

One of the ways to get started on learning if your products is actually working on Google Shopping, is by running a test in our service called productfeedanalyzer.com, which is a free service where you can test how well your feed actually performs.

If you can’t do all these things in your own tools or in your own platform Wakeupdata will gladly help you out both in helping you understand what you should do and also we have the product, that can do the things for you. Thank you for listening.